Grandma Isn't Your Average Abortion Movie

In the spiky indie gem Grandma, producer-writer-director Paul Weitz (About a Boy, In Good Company) has provided Lily Tomlin with the most fully realized—and perhaps most memorable—role in her storied and eclectic career. Tomlin actually had a similar part—as the flinty, fervent second-wave-feminist mother to Tina Fey's hopelessly conflicted Gen X striver in the Weitz-directed Admission (2013)—but it was too minor (and underwritten) for the energy Tomlin deployed behind it. So big points to Weitz for apparently divining that Tomlin deserved a full showcase to lord it over.

That she does from the first frame, as we abruptly intrude on aging poet Elle Reid's brutal ejection of an adoring poet-girlfriend from her funky Los Angeles bungalow. (If you've seen the glorious video clips of Tomlin's full-tilt squabbles with director David O. Russell on the set of I Heart Huckabees, you'll be less disoriented than the average moviegoer.) Reid has recently lost her partner of 38 years, Violet (by all accounts a benign and pacifying presence in Reid's life). She has also squared her debts and cut up her credit cards, with very few dollars to spare in her cash flow. (File under "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.")

She's at a belated, unforeseen, and clearly somewhat bewildering crossroads in her life. So, of course, that's just when her dewy, angel-faced, quick-witted 18-year-old granddaughter, Sage (Julia Garner), would appear on her doorstep in urgent need of an abortion and bereft of the resources with which to obtain one.

Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

The first obvious clue about the generational dynamics in this family is that Sage has elected not to approach her mother about her crisis. And it seems that Reid isn't in regular contact, either, with her daughter, Judy—a hard-charging, hard-headed corporate lawyer and single mom (played with astringent pith by Marcia Gay Harden), whom we first encounter at a treadmill desk in her office. So Reid realizes that she and Sage must sally forth in Violet's old 1950s-vintage Dodge sedan and crisscross L.A. to call in some old debts, or take on some new ones, in the cause of raising the $630 that Sage needs. A complication soon emerges: Reid has burned a lot of bridges—and it's not hard to see how, given the verbal fireworks that tend to ensue when she tries to reconnect. "I don't have an anger problem," she tells Sage at one point, "I have an asshole problem!" Evidence suggests that both propositions may be true—first via a volatile (and very funny) confrontation between Reid and Sage's unhelpful and noncommittal boyfriend.

Grandma turns into a picaresque adventure as we get a tour of various people from Reid's past. Among others, there's the owner of the Bonobo Cafe and bookstore (the untimely departed La Bamba star Elizabeth Peña), to whom Reid hopes to sell her first editions of iconic feminist tracts for a useful amount of money. (When Sage admits, to Reid's scandalization, that she's never heard of Betty Friedan or The Feminine Mystique, she comes back at her grandma: Has she ever heard of Mystique, of X-Men fame? Huh! Didn't think so—so, yeah, different generations!) There's Karl (Sam Elliott, the magnificently mellow Marlboro Man-voiced cowboy actor whose résumé dates back to 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), a decades-ago acquaintance of Reid's who, four wives later, now abides in an iconic ranch manse overlooking the Pacific Ocean. And there's a great cameo by the unsinkable Laverne Cox in there, too.

All these roads somehow lead, of course, to the clinic. Grandma is about a clan in which an abortion is more of a logistical than a moral (much less a theological) challenge, but the film doesn't try to evade its gravity, either. Early on, Reid asks Sage whether she has really thought her decision through—because, Reid says, Sage will be thinking about it for the rest of her life. Later, when Sage gets emotional about her situation, Reid says, with characteristic bluntness, "If you don't cry about this, then what the hell are you going to cry about?" There's lived-in wisdom in Reid's bluff honesty, and at the closing shot, of her marching off across L.A., we're left to conclude hopefully that she's got a lot more marching in her.

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